There is a particular satisfaction in looking at something we have built and knowing how much work it took to get there. A career completed. A family raised. A business established. A home made secure. A difficult year survived. A project finally brought to completion. We look at the result and think, with some justification: I did this.

Parashat Ki Tavo begins with a farmer who has every reason to feel exactly that way. He has worked the land. He has planted, waited, worried, cultivated, and harvested. Now the first fruits have ripened, and he brings them to the sanctuary as tangible evidence of success. Yet when he arrives, the Torah does something unexpected. It does not allow him simply to say, “Look what I have produced.” Instead, he must tell a story. Arami oved avi “My father was a wandering Aramean.”

Suddenly, the story is no longer only about this farmer. It stretches backward through generations. It includes vulnerability, Egypt, slavery, suffering, deliverance, wilderness, and finally the land from which this harvest has grown. The Torah does not diminish his labor. He worked hard. But it refuses to allow him to believe that his labor is the whole story. Before he may celebrate what he has accomplished, he must remember everything that made his accomplishment possible.

That strikes me as an especially important challenge in a culture that prizes the idea of the self-made person. We admire........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)